This video discusses CNN's fake news that is picked up by many other media outlets so they are all pushing their anti-Trump narrative, but CNN is simultaneously running a CNN only reports on the facts first initiative ad campaign. LOLZ!

I AM OFFICIALLY IN HELL!

I live my philosophy, it's personal to me and people who engage where I live establish an unspoken dynamic, a relationship of sorts, with me and my philosophy.

Cutting folks for sport is a reality for the poor in spirit. I myself only cut the poor in spirit on Tues., Thurs., and every other Sat.

The above interesting only from the point if view, that the media , as a viral apparatus, will react , as will all apparati, with the notion , that attack be handled within its own terms of understanding its signals. At this point it does not even matter who the protagonist, but points to a general malaise to the underscored and historic declaration by Marshall Mcluhen, that the media is the message. IT's beyond the point where clarifying be more meaningful.

Republicans in Congress have come back early from vacation, to question Bruce Per, a Justice Department expert who prosecuted underworld digires in the eighties and nineties, to try to undermine this man.

On another front, White House Concil try to influence Trump to not fire his Attorney General, not pardon Manaford, who was deep into the Kiev connection in influence peddling and money laundering, in addition to guaranteeing access to Trump for their efforts to influence public opinion prior to the election .

Again, I am unbiased , and still feel that the internal political collusion is still on, (at least media ways).

Politically, the grand standing promises of the wall, the North American and Mexican Nafta cancellations are being renegotiated China economic boycotts, the North Korean debacle , do not look very promising either.

Meanwhile the Florida and Arizona congressional elections held today do not show a good form for the Republicans either.

For critiques who brand this forum as being anti -Trump, hold on, and see how the premise in this coincides with what will happen, at least until after Congressional elections on the hole.

To show how this charge-counter charge works , I shall include an anecdote about John Podesta, whose brother admitted to various dinner parties, where high government officials were present, and the menus included 'spirit cooking' , containing various delicacies made of such things as pigs blood, human sperm and other bodily fluids. It was Podesta, remember whose e-mails were pirated by Russian interested groups, and now the fact that Trump was informed is contested now. Pizza gate and other goodies, even if tenuous, don't bode well for that vamp, as well.

What the heck is going on in upper achelons defies anything heard heretofore.

My gut level is, that this whole political arena is so conflated , that maybe the Russian connection is externalizations of something's extremely wrong politically and my guess is, that the upper echelons are ALL corrupt, and perhaps they are manufacturing this whole 3 ring circus as a diversion , a diversion approved and condoned by Russia, so as to prevent the emergence of a new unaffordable and fatalistic cold war with quite prone to end forebodingly catastrophic.

Sort of wish Arminius was still here , he pointed to this theory, or quite like it, but not on exact terms. I wish he could add something here from the German point of view.

That Soros was very supportive in helping the outcome of the Florida primary for governor presents the opposite, however.

Talking of opposites and reversals , the conclusion is tempting to make, that this conflation is deliberate and not at all unplanned .

The New World Order is a given and the kind of bait used gives the clue .

The reversals are as above geared on many levels some psychologically passed as reverse psychology, philosophocally, reversed from an implication of neo Kantian through a backward look from a pragmatic utalitarianism, where the intent is covered by even a more subtle approach toward/from Heidegger.

But the nature of the new world order is intended not as a.socially beneficial bit programmed for a reinforced Capital , ism, again reversely.

WendyDarling wrote:A South African Boer thanking Trump for tweeting correctly about the violence against whites in South Africa even though the fake news said it was a white supremacist conspiracy hoax.

Wendy, it is true , it is nowadays very difficult to tell truth from fake, but one side can not fight fake with truth, when truth itself is labeled fake.

If fake fights fake, to make another counter charge of fake, will be amusing at best who are really trying to keep score. The bottom line is beginning to be felt , is an uncaring and dismissive attitude by the public , who are beginning to think that its business as usual. The polls matter, but the public's attitude by the time the Congressional elections come around may predictably account for this , and they may stay away.

Another day a comedian put it aptly: That if tomorrow news media would announce that Trump was filling all White House abandoned positions with Russians, people would yawn, and say things like , maybe we will really be able to clean the swamp now, those Russians are very good at politics.

Trump threatens to exit WTO on account of no viable agreements with China, who complained to the body for the tariffs . He also said he moat probably will fire Director of Justice Department after the elections .

He claims the WTO is partial to China and in lawsuits, they usually win.He claims the whole world is taking advantage of the U.S., and that is the cause of US economic decline part ulaeily vis. China trade. The deadline with forging an agreement with Mexico and Canada song look that hot either , with deadlines coming soon.

Mueller is predicted to drop something huge today , a reliable prediction says, because it is urgent that he finish his business.

This , a response to Trump quote that the Mueller investigation is illegal. I think , had Trump been a trained lawyer, these blunders could have been avoided.

The same sources are seeing anfrantox Trump, with walls closing in on him , furiously with anger . lashing out. He came out the day before with another doozie, telling everyone that ofnje impeached, violent riots will occur on the streets.

Personally, I think he is pretty fair dealing with the Chinese on trade, but his background may male him unsuitable. Well let's see if the predictions are on the money or not.

POLITICSRudy Giuliani On White House Blocking Release Of Full Mueller Report: ‘I’m Sure We Will’In an interview, the Trump attorney also said that his team was preparing a lengthy report rebutting special counsel Robert Mueller's expected findings.By Dominique Mosbergen09/03/2018 11:03 AM ETRudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and Trump attorney,&nbsp;says the White House will likely try to block the full Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and Trump attorney, says the White House will likely try to block the full public release of Robert Mueller’s expected final Russia report. (Regis Duvignau / Reuters)Rudy Giuliani says the White House would likely attempt to block a full public release of Robert Mueller’s anticipated final report about the Russia investigation ― bolstering long-held fears that the special counsel’s ultimate findings may never see the light of day.

Giuliani’s startling admission was tucked inside an expansive New Yorker profile of the former New York City mayor and Trump attorney, published online Monday.

Giuliani, who like the president has repeatedly described the Russia probe as a “witch hunt,” told journalist Jeffrey Toobin that Trump’s original legal team had struck a deal with Mueller about his expected final report that would allow the White House to “object to the public disclosure of information that might be covered by executive privilege.”

“I asked Giuliani if he thought the White House would raise objections,” wrote Toobin in the profile.

“I’m sure we will,” Giuliana responded, noting that it would be the president who “would make the final call.”

Giuliani, whom Trump hired in April amid a change in the president’s legal representation in the special counsel probe, said that his team was preparing a lengthy report which they planned to release at the same time as Mueller’s to “refute its expected findings.”

As Vox explained in an earlier article, Mueller is only required by law to deliver a final report to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who will ultimately decide whether to release any or all of Mueller’s findings to Congress or the public.

Victoria Nourse, a Georgetown law professor, told Vox that Trump could also “order” Rosenstein not to release it.

“But,” she added, “that’s a bit like firing Mueller, as many Republicans have warned — it just ups the case for impeachment because the president appears to be hiding something.”

Whatever the White House’s reaction ends up being to Mueller’s ultimate findings, the assessment is expected to trigger contentious political bickering as Rosenstein is pressured from different sides to release ― or suppress ― the information.

“It’ll be a moment that polarizes the country, exposing just how divided the country is about this investigation and who’s on the other side,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich told The Washington Post in June.

Listening to a part of testimonies and testimonials , the basic one liner can be expressed as further proof of switching various issues , and again the clear cut message is that ' if we can't clear up this mess, how in the world do you think you can? Kamala Harris was as erudite as Lindsey Graham, and proofs of honesty seemed like a calculated effort to reduce cynicism to the order of at least a marginal pitch as politically correct efforts to establish somewhat credible boundaries.the circle needs to be closed, at least to the point of allowable exatness, where the margin of error may safely held to be on neutral ground.

That divisive politics and policies are extra directed at situational , and only some issues laden with partisanship, became conflicting. and defensively posed; making public announcements and private beliefs a calculus of expected opinion shaping.

This defensiveness , supported by emotionally laden strategizing plays well , when folded into an expected. neutralization, kind of like averaging out the expected affect/effect of a carefully crafted product.

This is in line with the inversion, or introjective reduction from some kind of parity through a workable use of it.

But will it really work? The expectations and the results may provide a clearer picture.

At heart, is, whether if elected, will the basic motive be successfully shown to be grounded in justice , or,/ either based on executive over reach, capacity, and possible breach.

The level of lack of social realism also comes into play, when there are discernable limits, as to the variable indexes of trustworthiness, value judgements and credibility coming into play. How long before the optical clarity will result in a general public myopia , or awareness of it being not part of the solution rather then the problem in itself? Will the circle of doubt generally accept a legal definition of what overstepped common sense implies, and wade into untested territories of general neuroasthenia?

An again is it the case of unproven effective anesthetic, mitigating all doubt of variable SET differences , which have driven some heavy hitters mad? Can that be overcome ? Probably , given the right cues, and management.

For that to happen , they will need a hero or an exemplary act.

Who in today's geopolitical climate is up for that?

Constitutional crisis?This Is a Constitutional CrisisA cowardly coup from within the administration threatens to enflame the president’s paranoia and further endanger American security.

DAVID FRUM4:54 PM ET

YURI GRIPAS / REUTERSImpeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.

If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.

Make your inbox more interesting.

Each weekday evening, get an overview of the day’s biggest news, along with fascinating ideas, images, and people.

On Wednesday, though, a “senior official in the Trump administration” published an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, writing:

Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.

The author of the anonymous op-ed is hoping to vindicate the reputation of like-minded senior Trump staffers. See, we only look complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story.

But what the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.

MORE BY DAVID FRUMCongressional Republicans Are the Real Authors of the Anonymous Op-EdPETER BEINARTA Judge Who Can’t Be Vetted Shouldn’t Be ConfirmedGARRETT EPPSThe Key Lesson of Ayanna Pressley’s VictoryPETER BEINARTTaking a Blowtorch to DebateALEX WAGNERWhat happens the next time a staffer seeks to dissuade the president from, say, purging the Justice Department to shut down the Mueller investigation? The author of the Times op-ed has explicitly told the president that those who offer such advice do not have the president’s best interests at heart, and are, in fact, actively subverting his best interests as he understands them on behalf of ideas of their own.

He’ll grow more defiant, more reckless, more anti-constitutional, and more dangerous.

The inadvisable president

And those who do not quit or are not fired in the next few days will have to work even more assiduously to prove themselves loyal, obedient, and on the team. Things will be worse after this piece. They will be worse because of this piece.

The new Bob Woodward book set the bad precedent. The high official who thought the president so addled that he would not remember the paper he snatched off his desk? Those who thought the president stupid, ignorant, beholden to Russia—and then exited the administration to return to their comfortable, lucrative occupations? Who substituted deep-background gripe sessions with a reporter for offering detailed proof of presidential unfitness, or worse, before the House or Senate? Yes, better than the robotic servility of the public record. But only slightly.

The most extraordianary quotes from Bob Woodward’s book

What would be better?

Speak in your own name. Resign in a way that will count. Present the evidence that will justify an invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or an impeachment, or at the very least, the first necessary step toward either outcome, a Democratic Congress after the November elections.

Your service in government is valuable. Thank you for it. But it is not so indispensable that it can compensate for the continuing tenure of a president you believe to be amoral, untruthful, irrational, anti-democratic, unpatriotic, and dangerous. Previous generations of Americans have sacrificed fortunes, health, and lives to serve the country. You are asked only to tell the truth aloud and with your name attached.

Senior officials in the Trump administration have been working from within to frustrate parts of the president's agenda to protect the country from his worst inclinations, an anonymous Trump official wrote in a column published by the New York Times on Sept. 5. (Reuters)President Trump and his aides reacted with indignation Wednesday to an unsigned opinion column from a senior official blasting the president’s “amorality” and launched a frantic hunt for the author, who claims to be part of a secret “resistance” inside the government protecting the nation from its commander in chief.

The extraordinary column, published anonymously in the New York Times, surfaced one day after the first excerpts emerged from Bob Woodward’s new book, in which Trump’s top advisers painted a devastating portrait of the president and described a “crazytown” atmosphere inside the White House.

Taken together, they landed like a thunder clap, portraying Trump as a danger to the country that elected him and feeding the president’s paranoia about whom around him he can trust.

Trump reacted to the column with “volcanic” anger and was “absolutely livid” over what he considered a treasonous act of disloyalty and told confidants he suspects the official works on national security issues or in the Justice Department, according to two people familiar with his private discussions.

Trump questioned on Twitter whether the official was a “phony source,” and wrote that if “the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”

President Trump pauses to listen a question from a reporter regarding The New York Times' anonymous op-ed after a meeting with sheriffs at the White House Wednesday. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)In a column titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” the person whom the Times identifies only as a “senior official” describes Trump’s leadership style as “impetuous” and accuses him of acting recklessly “in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

Related: [Top appointees are ‘thwarting’ Trump, says ‘senior official’ in New York Times opinion piece]

The official writes that Cabinet members witnessed enough instability by their boss that there were “early whispers” of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office but decided instead to avoid a constitutional crisis and work within the administration to contain him.

“Many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided im­pulses until he is out of office,” the official writes.

The column, which published midafternoon Wednesday, sent tremors through the West Wing and launched a frantic guessing game. Startled aides canceled meetings and huddled behind closed doors to strategize a response. Aides were analyzing language patterns to try to discern the author’s identity or at a minimum the part of the administration where the author works.

“The problem for the president is it could be so many people,” said one administration official, who like many others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “You can’t rule it down to one person. Everyone is trying, but it’s impossible.”

The phrase “The sleeper cells have awoken” circulated on text messages among aides and outside allies.

President Trump holds a meeting with Republican House and Senate leadership in the Roosevelt Room at the White House Wednesday. (LEAH MILLIS/Reuters)“It’s like the horror movies when everyone realizes the call is coming from inside the house,” said one former White House official in close contact with former co-workers.

The stark and anonymous warning was a breathtaking event without precedent in modern presidential history.

“For somebody within the belly of the White House to be saying there are a group of us running a resistance, making sure the president of the United States doesn’t do irrational and dangerous things, it is a mind-boggling moment,” historian Douglas Brinkley said.

The column added to the evolving narrative of Trump’s presidency, based on daily news reporting and books like Woodward’s that rely on candid accounts of anonymous admin­istration officials.

“This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from Day One,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told reporters. He added, “That’s why I think all of us encourage the good people around the president to stay.”

Related: [President Trump slams ‘gutless’ New York Times ‘resistance’ op-ed]

Trump was the first to speak for the administration and lashed out at the Times for its decision to publish the column.

“The failing New York Times has an anonymous editorial — can you believe it? — anonymous, meaning gutless, a gutless editorial,” Trump told reporters during an event with sheriffs in the East Room of the White House.

The president went on to brag about his popularity, although nearly all public polls show that more Americans disapprove of his job performance than approve of it. “Our poll numbers are great, and guess what? Nobody’s going to come even close to beating me in 2020,” Trump said, as the sheriffs assembled behind him burst into applause.

The president later tweeted a single word alleging a possible crime: “TREASON?”

In the Times column, the official writes about the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) in heroic terms, describing him as “a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue.”

This invocation angered Trump, who in his private talks with advisers and friends expressed particular dismay because he has long viewed McCain as a personal enemy, according to people familiar with the president’s thinking. The column reignited Trump’s frustration with last week’s remembrances of McCain and the widespread adulation of his life.

The president was already feeling especially vulnerable — and a deep “sense of paranoia,” in the words of one confidant — after his devastating portrayal in Woodward’s book. He was upset that so many in his orbit seemed to have spoken with the veteran Washington Post investigative journalist, and he had begun peppering staffers with questions about who Woodward’s sources were.

Trump already felt that he had a dwindling circle of people whom he could trust, a senior administration official said. According to one Trump friend, he fretted after Wednesday’s op-ed that he could trust only his children.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also denounced the opinion column in a ferociously worded statement that channeled her boss’s rage and echoed some of his favorite attacks on the media.

Her statement began by invoking Trump’s 2016 election victory and noting, “None of them voted for a gutless, anonymous source to the failing New York Times.” Sanders went on to demand that the paper apologize for what she called the “pathetic, reckless, and selfish op-ed,” and urged the anonymous author to leave the White House.

“The individual behind this piece has chosen to deceive, rather than support, the duly elected President of the United States,” she said in her statement. “He is not putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the American people. This coward should do the right thing and resign.”

Related: [The Fix: Another hostage in the White House comes forward]

There were immediate calls from Trump critics for the author to step forward and share more information with the public, including perhaps testifying before Congress, about Trump’s fitness for office.

Both inside the White House and in Trump’s broader orbit, aides and confidants scrambled to identify the anonymous official, windmilling in all directions; within just hours of publication, they privately offered up roughly a dozen different theories and suggested traitors.

One aide, for example, suggested a staffer seeking glory and secretly hoping to get caught, while another mused that the official was likely a low-level staffer in a peripheral agency. Others wondered aloud just what constituted a “senior official in the Trump administration.”

A spokeswoman for the Times said she was unable to provide any additional clarity on how the newspaper defines a senior administration official.

Times editorial page editor James Bennet declined to provide further information about the writer’s position or identity but said the newspaper received the column before news about Woodward’s book broke Tuesday. He said the newspaper “would not have been able to publish” the column if it had not granted anonymity to its author.

“We thought it was an important perspective to get out,” Bennet said. “Our preference is not to publish anonymously and we seldom do it. The question is, do we think the piece was important enough to make an exception? We feel strongly that it was.”

Related: [All the speculation that’s fit to tweet: Who wrote that anonymous Times op-ed?]

The outing of the op-ed’s author is virtually inevitable, according to forensic linguists, who work in both academia and private industry, figuring out the authors of anonymous texts in lawsuits, plagiarism cases and historical puzzles.

“We take the questioned document and compare it to known exemplars,” said Robert Leonard, a linguist at Hofstra University who is often retained by defendants and prosecutors in criminal cases involving threats, plagiarism and libel.

But although many people immediately launched into amateur forensic investigations after publication of the Times piece, Leonard cautioned that “a problem with public people is that a lot of their published work is edited, so it’s like mixing fingerprints or DNA. You don’t always know who the real author is.”

Brinkley, the historian, said the most analogous example of disloyalty and advisers disregarding the president’s wishes was in Richard Nixon’s final year as president. He explained that Nixon would “bark crazy orders” to aides that they intentionally disregarded.

“You’d have to go back to Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes,’ to see this syndrome where the president’s reality happens to be so different from his own senior advisers,” Brinkley said.

Paul Farhi and Marc Fisher contributed to this report.

8.7k CommentsPhilip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.

Ashley Parker is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress, among other things.

Josh Dawsey is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017. He previously covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal.

Photo edited by Slate. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.JURISPRUDENCEI Wrote Some of the Stolen Memos That Brett Kavanaugh Lied to the Senate AboutHe should be impeached, not elevated.By Lisa GravesSep. 7, 2018 3:43 PMMuch of Washington has spent the week focusing on whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. After the revelations of his confirmation hearings, the better question is whether he should be impeached from the federal judiciary.

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I do not raise that question lightly, but I am certain it must be raised.

Newly released emails show that while he was working to move through President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees in the early 2000s, Kavanaugh received confidential memos, letters, and talking points of Democratic staffers stolen by GOP Senate aide Manuel Miranda. That includes research and talking points Miranda stole from the Senate server after I had written them for the Senate Judiciary Committee as the chief counsel for nominations for the minority.

Receiving those memos and letters alone is not an impeachable offense.

No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it.

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For example, in 2004, Sen. Orrin Hatch asked him directly if he received “any documents that appeared to you to have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Kavanaugh responded, unequivocally, “No.”

In 2006, Sen. Ted Kennedy asked him if he had any regrets about how he treated documents he had received from Miranda that he later learned were stolen. Kavanaugh rejected the premise of the question, restating that he never even saw one of those documents.

Back then the senators did not have the emails that they have now, showing that Miranda sent Kavanaugh numerous documents containing what was plainly research by Democrats. Some of those emails went so far as to warn Kavanaugh not to distribute the Democratic talking points he was being given. If these were documents shared from the Democratic side of the aisle as part of normal business, as Kavanaugh claimed to have believed in his most recent testimony, why would they be labeled “not [for] distribution”? And why would we share our precise strategy to fight controversial Republican nominations with the Republicans we were fighting?

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Another email chain included the subject line “spying.” It’s hard to imagine a more definitive clue than that. Another said “Senator Leahy’s staff has distributed a confidential letter to Dem Counsel” and then described for Kavanaugh that precise confidential information we had gathered about a nominee Kavanaugh was boosting. Again, it is illogical to think that we would have just given Miranda this “confidential” information for him to use against us. But this is precisely what Judge Kavanaugh suggested in his testimony on Wednesday. He is not that naïve.

In the hearing this week, Sen. Leahy also noted that the previously hidden emails showed that Miranda asked to meet Kavanaugh in person to give him “paper” files with “useful info to map out [Sens. Joe] Biden and [Dianne] Feinstein, and others.” The promised information included “Biden-speak.” Again, this would not have been a normal information exchange.

In response to Leahy’s questions this week, Kavanaugh made the outlandish claim that it was typical for him to be told what Democrats planned to ask at these combative hearings over controversial nominees, and that this was in fact the “coin of the realm.” As a Democrat who worked on those questions, I can say definitively that it was not typical at all. Kavanaugh knows this full well.

At the time, Kavanaugh was working with Miranda and outside groups to try to force these nominees through the Senate over Democratic objections, and it would have been suicide to give them our research, talking points, strategies, or confidential letters. The GOP senators, their staff, the White House, and outside groups were working intensively to undermine the work of Democratic senators to block the most extreme of President Bush’s judicial nominees.

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The Leahy talking points given to Kavanaugh were from my in-depth research into why the Senate had compelling historical precedent for examining Miguel Estrada’s Department of Justice records, which the White House counsel’s office was refusing to surrender. Other confidential materials Miranda shared with Kavanaugh related to investigations Democrats were pursuing over how Judge Priscilla Owen had handled an abortion case involving parental consent and about the overlap between her funders and groups with business before the courts of Texas. We would never have provided that information—key to our strategy to try to block what we considered extremist judicial nominations—to Miranda or to the White House.

During his testimony, Kavanaugh conflated these adversarial proceedings with ones in which Democrats might have cooperated with the other side, like the Patriot Act and airline liability. But these weren’t hearings on some bill where senators would share their concerns across the aisle to try to get a bipartisan fix on problems in a piece of legislation. These were oppositional proceedings in committee and on the floor over controversial judicial nominees. Kavanaugh knew this just as intimately as I did—our sides fought over those nominations intensely.

It was also an area where Kavanaugh’s judicial nominations alliance had taken a scorched-earth approach, attacking Democrats ruthlessly. The White House’s closest allies went so far as to call Leahy and other Democrats on the committee “anti-Catholic,” even running attack ads.

Perhaps Kavanaugh was so blinded by his quest to get the most controversial Bush nominees confirmed in 2003 that he did not have any concerns about the bounty of secret memos and letters he was receiving—the full extent of which is not known because so many documents are still secret.

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But, surely, reasonable questions about what he had been party to would have been considered after the story of the theft exploded in the news, Miranda was forced to resign, and the U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms began a bipartisan investigation into the files stolen from the Senate?

As of November 2003, when the sergeant-at-arms seized the Judiciary Committee’s servers, Kavanaugh would have been on notice that any of the letters, talking points, or research described as being from Democrats that were provided to him by Miranda were suspect and probably stolen from the Senate’s server.

But he did nothing. He did not come forward to the Senate to provide information about the confidential documents Miranda had given him, which were clearly from the Democrats.

Kavanaugh also apparently did nothing when the Senate referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office for criminal prosecution. (Miranda was never prosecuted.)

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Eventually, though, Kavanaugh went even further to help cover up the details of the theft.

During the hearings on his nomination to the D.C. Circuit a few months after the Miranda news broke, Kavanaugh actively hid his own involvement, lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee by stating unequivocally that he not only knew nothing of the episode, but also never even received any stolen material.

Even if Kavanaugh could claim that he didn’t have any hint at the time he received the emails that these documents were of suspect provenance—which I personally find implausible—there is no reasonable way for him to assert honestly that he had no idea what they were after the revelation of the theft. Any reasonable person would have realized they had been stolen, and certainly someone as smart as Kavanaugh would have too.

But he lied.

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Under oath.

And he did so repeatedly.

Significantly, he did so even though a few years earlier he had helped spearhead the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for perjury in a private civil case. Back then Kavanaugh took lying under oath so seriously that he was determined to do everything he could to help remove a president from office.

Now we know that he procured his own confirmation to the federal bench by committing the same offense. And he did so not in a private case but in the midst of public hearings for a position of trust, for a lifetime appointment to the federal judiciary.

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His actions were dishonorable and dishonest.

This week, as part of his efforts to be elevated to the highest court in the land, he has calmly continued to deceive, falsely claiming that it would have been perfectly normal for him to receive secret Democratic letters, talking points, and other materials. And if this absurd notion were somehow true, it would not even be consistent with what he testified to 12 and 14 years ago. Back then, he didn’t state it would have been normal for him to receive secret Democratic strategy materials.

Instead, he explicitly and repeatedly went out of his way to say he never had access to any such materials. These objectively false statements were offered under oath to convince the committee of something that was untrue. It was clearly intentional, with Kavanaugh going so far as to correct Sen. Kennedy when the senator described the document situation accurately.

That’s why—without even getting into other reasonable objections to his nomination—he should not be confirmed.

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In fact, by his own standard, he should clearly be impeached.

Lisa Graves is the co-founder of Documented, which investigates corporate influence on democracy. She is the former chief counsel for nominations for the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice.

Read more of Slate’s coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.Kavanaugh’s Refusal to Recuse Himself From Mueller’s Cases Tells You Everything You Need to KnowBrett Kavanaugh Is Cherry-Picking the Cases He Says Count as PrecedentBrett Kavanaugh Shows You Don’t Have to Be a Sexual Harasser to Perpetuate a System of AbuseThe Documents Cory Booker Released Don’t Matter. His “I Am Spartacus” Moment Did.

Don't worry the elites are already banning all Trumpets from the social media and social media is all kids know. When the president is removed by the elites no body will even know that someone disagreed.

Americans are racists, the elites know this very right. Make America Great Again is racist. America is only one out of 300 equal nations and we are all normal not great.

Greatness is unfair if you think about it very well.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed. ~ Владимир Ильич Ульянов Ленин

Watergate journalist Bob Woodward made headlines once again this past week, with his new book about the Trump White House, entitled "Fear." This morning, in his first TV interview, Woodward paints a picture for our David Martin of an administration in disarray:

"You look at the operation of this White House and you have to say, 'Let's hope to God we don't have a crisis,'" said Bob Woodward.

For the Washington Post reporter, that is the bottom line to all the jaw-dropping chaos and discord described in his new book, "Fear: Trump in the White House" (published by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS).

Simon & Schuster"People who work for him are worried ... that he will sign things or give orders that threaten the national security or the financial security of the country, or of the world," Woodward said.

Aides like then-Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn and White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter literally stole documents off the president's desk in the Oval Office, such as a letter terminating a trade agreement with South Korea, so that, Woodward explained, Mr. Trump could not sign them: "Because they realized that this would endanger the country."

Martin asked, "How'd they get away with that?"

"[Trump] doesn't remember. If it's not on his desk, if it's not immediately available for action, it goes away."

Unelected officials like Cohn and Porter intentionally thwarting the actions of the elected president – the exact reverse of what a White House staff is supposed to do.

Going back to Richard Nixon and Watergate, this is the ninth White House Woodward has covered. "In the eight others," he said, "I never heard of people on the staff in the White House engaging in that kind of extreme action."

In Woodward's telling, President Trump does not see America as the indispensable nation; he sees it as an international sucker taken advantage of by allies and trading partners. He complained his advisors "don't know anything about business. All they want to is protect everybody … that we pay for."

According to Woodward, the president is obsessed by the fact that the U.S. pays $3.5 billion a year to station troops in South Korea as a first line of defense against the North. "I don't know why they're there," he said at one meeting. "Let's bring them all home." At another meeting, Secretary of Defense James Mattis starkly why the U.S. has 28,000 troops in Korea: "We're doing this in order to prevent World War III."

"The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea." - President Trump at the United Nation, Sept. 19, 2017

The standoff with North Korea has been eased, for the moment, by the Singapore Summit, which brought together two leaders who had been trading nuclear threats and schoolyard insults.

Trump: "'Rocket Man' is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime."

The president later made that "Little Rocket Man" on Twitter, which he told Rob Porter "may be my best ever." When Porter asked if it might provoke Kim, according to Woodward, the president replied, "It's leader versus leader, man versus man, me versus Kim."

The most dangerous moment of the standoff, Woodward says, came when the president went to work on another tweet: "He drafts a tweet saying 'We are going to pull out dependents from South Korea ... Family members of the 28,000 people there.'"

That tweet was never sent, because of a back channel message from North Korea that it would regard a pullout of dependents as a sign the U.S. was preparing to attack. "At that moment there was a sense of profound alarm in the Pentagon leadership that, 'My God, one tweet and we have reliable information that the North Koreans are going to read this as an attack is imminent,'" Woodward said.

The president surrounded himself with generals – active duty and retired – all of whom had served in Afghanistan. But before he decided on a new Afghan strategy, he insisted on meeting with enlisted men who had served there as well. In a meeting the next day, he lashed out at the generals: "I don't care about you guys," he said to Mattis, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Joseph Dunford, and then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. "'The soldiers on the ground could run things much better than you,' he says to Mattis and Dunford, and there is a 25-minute dressing down of the generals and senior officials," said Woodward.

In a recent tweet, the president acknowledged: "I'm tough as hell on people and if I weren't nothing would get done."

When he didn't like a trade deal Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had negotiated with China, the president lit into him at a White House meeting: "It's a terrible deal. We got screwed. ... You're past your prime. You're not a good negotiator anymore. ... you've lost it. I don't trust you."

When Economic Adviser Gary Cohn was upset over the president's reluctance to condemn white supremacists for the violence in Charlottesville he went into the Oval Office to resign. According to Woodward, "Trump said, 'You can't resign. I need you to do tax reform. If you leave, this is treason.' And Trump talked him out of resigning."

Afterwards, Chief of Staff John Kelly, who had been in the room, pulled Cohn aside: "Cohn wrote this down, quote from General Kelly: 'If that was me I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his *** six different times.'"

Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, interviewed by CBS News' David Martin.CBS NewsThe president has been bracing for Woodward's book since last month when the two lamented – or at least pretended to lament – that they had not talked.

Woodward recorded the phone conversation, with the president's permission:

Trump: "It's really too bad because nobody told me about it, and I would've loved to have spoken to you. You know I'm very open to you. I think you've always been fair."Woodward: "It's a tough look at the world and your administration and you."Trump: "Right. Well, I assume that means it's going to be a negative book. ... That's all right. Some are good and some are bad. Sounds like this is going to be a bad one."

Last week, when the contents of "Fear" began to leak ahead of its scheduled publication, the president said it was worse than bad. "The book is a work of fiction," Mr. Trump argued. "If you look back at Woodward's past, he had the same problem with other presidents. He likes to get publicity, sell some books."

Martin said, "He's added 'fake books' to his complaints about 'fake news.' Are you ready for a tweetstorm directed at you?"

"I've been there before," Woodward replied.

In the 1970s Woodward's stories (written with Carl Bernstein) on Richard Nixon and Watergate were repeatedly denounced (Press Secretary Ron Ziegler said, "We respect the free press, I respect the free press; I don't respect the type of journalism, the shabby journalism that is being practiced by the Washington Post"), until the White House was forced to apologize.

Working on this book, Woodward says he went back to the days of his youth when he and Bernstein made late-night visits to the homes of potential sources.

Woodward recalled, "In one case I called somebody at 11 o'clock at night and said I'd like to talk. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get to it.' And I said, 'Well, how about now?' And he said, 'Now? It's 11 at night!' And I said, 'I'm four minutes away.' 'Okay, come on over for a while.'"

He doesn't identify his sources, but most readers will conclude he talked to both Gary Cohn and Rob Porter, along with several other White House officials who quit or were fired.

Martin said, "The criticism would be, 'You've talked to the people who have an axe to grind against the president.'"

"Well, that's just not true," he replied. "Look, I talked to dozens and dozens of people, and have notes and documentation on lots of things."

Woodward quotes harsh criticism of the president from some of his closest advisers. Chief of Staff Kelly called his boss an "idiot." Secretary of Defense Mattis said the commander-in-chief acted like, and had the understanding of, "a fifth- or sixth-grader." Both men have denied saying such things.

And the president continues to denounce the book at every turn. At a rally Friday night Mr. Trump said, "These guys that write books and they put phony quotes out all over the – totally phony quotes. I mean, totally, like, fraudulent books. They're, like, fraudulent books!"

Martin asked, "He says the quotes are just not the way he speaks and the quotes are fabricated. What do you say to that?"

In a second interview with CBS' "Sunday Morning," Woodward said he had multiple sources for every claim in the book: "Multiple interviews with key witnesses. One person I interviewed nine times, and the transcripts of those conversations are 700 or 800 pages."

"700-800 pages for one person?"

"Yes, sir."

"How many people did you interview?"

"Over a hundred. I would say that maybe half of those are key people."

The theme of Woodward's book – that aides fear what the president might do if allowed to follow his impulses – received an unusual confirmation last week, when The New York Times published an anonymous article written by a person described as "a senior official in the Trump administration." "I work for the president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations," he or she wrote.

When asked if he knows the author's identity, Woodward said, "I have no idea who it is. It's very important, who it is. It's very important whether this is somebody who witnessed and participated. And quite frankly, if there was a person in the White House or the administration who wanted to tell me what's in that op-ed piece, I would say, 'Okay, name me who was there. What is the specific incident?' As you know, from having read my book, the dates and times and participants [are documented]."

He said that without that detail on the op-ed author's story, "I wouldn't have used it."

"Too vague?" asked Martin.

"Well, too vague, and does not meet the standards of trying to describe specific incidents. Specific incidents are the building blocks of journalism, as you well know."

"Fear: Trump in the White House" is Woodward's 19th book, and he says reporting it took him deeper inside a working White House than he's ever been before.

"This one was in the belly of the beast," he said.

Martin asked, "And what did you conclude about the beast?"

"That people better wake up to what's going on."

For more info:

"Fear: Trump in the White House" by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster), available via Amazonbobwoodward.comBob Woodward at the Washington PostFollow @realBobWoodward on Twitter

Unless Syria will simply hand its most heavily pro-jihadist province, Idlib, to adjoining Turkey, which claims to have 30,000 troops there and is planning to add 20,000 more, World War III will probably happen soon, and here is why:

Russia’s troops are in Syria at the invitation of Syria’s Government and they have provided crucial assistance to restore the Government’s control over areas that the jihadists (sometimes called “Radical Islamic Terrorists” or otherwise) had seized. Consequently, unlike the Turks and the Americans, who are invaders of Syria, Russia is instead a defender of Syria, and is committed to doing there only what the Syrian Government authorizes it to do and what Russia is willing to do there.

Right now, the Trump Administration has committed itself to prohibiting Syria (and its allies) from retaking control of Idlib, which is the only province that was more than 90% in favor of Al Qaeda and of ISIS and against the Government at the start of the ‘civil war’ in Syria. Idlib is even more pro-jihadist now, because almost all of the surviving jihadists in Syria have sought refuge there — and the Government freely has bussed them there in order to minimize the amount of “human shield” hostage-taking by them in the other provinces. Countless innocent lives were saved this way.

Both Democratic and Republican U.S. federal officials and former officials are overwhelmingly supportive of U.S. President Trump’s newly announced determination to prohibit Syria from retaking control of that heavily jihadist province, and they state such things about Idlib as:

It has become a dumping ground for some of the hardcore jihadists who were not prepared to settle for some of the forced agreements that took place, the forced surrenders that took place elsewhere. … Where do people go when they’ve reached the last place that they can go? What’s the refuge after the last refuge? That’s the tragedy that they face.

That happened to be an Obama Administration official expressing support for the jihadists, and when he was asked by his interviewer “Did the world fail Syria?” he answered “Sure. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, the first person who failed Syria was President Assad himself.”

The U.S. Government in 2003 said that Saddam Hussein had failed Iraq and so America and its allies invaded and occupied there in 2003; and then America and its allies said that Muammar Qaddafi had failed Libyans and so invaded and occupied there in 2011; but, unlike Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, neither of those two heads-of-state was backed by Russia, and Assad is. That’s the main difference between him and those others. But the U.S. Government still demands ‘victory’ there; and, so, the world stands at the brink of WW III, the war to end all wars and (unlike its two predecessors) to end ourselves.

Therefore, unless Assad will simply hand Idlib over to adjoining Turkey, there will be war between the U.S. and Russia over Idlib. Since neither side will publicly admit its defeat in that U.S.-Russia war, the loser in it will naturally invade the other; and, regardless of whether the U.S. or Russia will be the first to do that (go nuclear), each of the two sides will still be able to annihilate the other after the other’s sudden blitz nuclear attack; and the end-result will be not only an unprecedentedly nuclear-contaminated planet, but a nuclear winter following it, in which agriculture will collapse, and the survivors will wish that they weren’t.

The way for the plan to avert that outcome to be carried out would be:

Assad and Putin both will announce that due to the complaints from the U.S. Government and from the United Nations and from the Turkish Government, Syria will give up Idlib province, and will construct on the border between it and the adjoining areas of Syria, a DMZ or De-Militarized Zone, so that not only will the residents in Idlib be safe from any attack by Syria and its allies (such as America and its allies have been demanding), but Syrians — in all the others of Syria’s provinces — will likewise be safe against any continued attacks by the jihadists that have concentrated themselves in Idlib.

This way, Turkey’s President Erdogan can safely keep his 50,000 troops in Idlib if he wishes; America’s President Trump can claim victory in Syria and finally fulfill his long-promised intention to end the U.S. occupation of (most of the jihadist-controlled) parts of Syria (which they’ve occupied), and maybe WW III can be avoided, or, at least, postponed, maybe even so that people living today won’t be dying-off from WW III and its after-effects.

If this peaceful path to ending the prelude to WW III — to avoiding the jump off a nuclear cliff — succeeds, then the world will be able to continue debating who was right and who was wrong in all of this. But, otherwise, that debate will simply be terminated by the war itself, and everyone will end up losing.

Here is how these and associated matters are being taught to school students in the United States. It’s a magazine that’s handed out free to school students in the U.S. to teach them the ‘history’ behind these current events, though it conflicts with the actual history behind them: but, of course, those children won’t know that history, because it’s not being taught to them.

*Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010.

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POLITICSTrump reportedly thinks getting impeached after losing the midterms would help him win in 2020Alex Lockie Sep 12, 2018, 7:02 AM ETDonald TrumpWin McNamee/Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump.President Donald Trump has reportedly woken up to the possibility of being impeached by Democrats but thinks he can play the situation toward a 2020 reelection.If he is impeached but not removed from office, the news website Axios said Wednesday, Trump would try to play the victim card and paint Democrats as having unfairly attacked him.

Respite:

What comes in as inspirational tid bits?

Since early spring had project to read -visible & invisible by Mearlieu .Ponty and did not get around to it, but connections of the kind M. Polanyi characterises as 'tacit knowledge' is making them for me

And again the film - - BLADE RUNNER, a Philip Dick original , thouches on the concept of beyond the postmodern, in visual ways, which closes the gap between the visual architecture architecture of the visible and the invisible in ways , where the realization of it can no longer imagined in post modern terms, where the hidden can still be unearthed with some kind of.sense of intelligent positivity, or nominally reduced , existentially held bracket.

This habors in the age paranoia, the distrust of the control by the controlled, and the rise of thecontroller

Hence it figures, that Trump would classify fear, as the ultimate source of control.

Trump the ultimate actor of deception, is really the very personification of the managed genius. And so, he enters the stage of post modernism.

The full circle of the mantra: to see is to exist has come full circle.

In this sense, Heidegger's ontological support of some kind of continuum reduced through an so I-philosophical sense, obliterated both language and the logic through which it transpires

This is why the great evil genius of Descartes, is bound to serve IT, as a commanded relic of the dual aspect , supported through the eons, both not one or the other, a hoped for fateful wish, to reinstall that which no aesthetic installation has been able to do.

The breakdown can not here-be restructured nor held in brackets any more, the washout is inevitable.

The new world order is an introjective project, and that such can come about, no longer rests in uncertainty.

New:

Fox News and talk radio show host Sean Hannity is a known ally and supporter of President Donald Trump, often using his various media platforms to offer praise or even policy advice for the president.

When talking to a listener who called into his radio show Tuesday afternoon, Hannity said he expects the president to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and end the investigation into Russian election interference “sooner rather than later,” potentially after Hurricane Florence passes. Given Hannity and Trump reportedly talk so regularly that some White House staffers, according to The Washington Post, have dubbed the conservative media personality the president's unofficial chief of staff, it remains to be seen whether Hannity is offering the president his personal advice or if he’s simply expressing wishful thinking.

A listener posed the question to Hannity of whether Trump can and should put an end to the Mueller investigation since there have been no crimes brought against him.

Multiple former Trump aides and associates have pleaded guilty to crimes stemming from Mueller’s investigation, in addition to his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort being convicted. Dozens of Russian nationals and Russian intelligence officers have been indicted for their roles in election meddling. The crimes allegedly committed by the former Trump aides and associates were not directly related to election interference and were mostly related to campaign finance violations, tax and bank fraud and taking money from foreign governments.

“Listen, I think all of that's going to happen,” Hannity said about whether he thought Trump would end the investigation and fire Mueller. The transcript and audio of a portion of Hannity’s Tuesday radio show was published by Media Matters for America. “I think it's going to happen sooner than later.”

Hannity went on to explain that he believed Trump would not make such a move around the anniversary of 9/11 and with Hurricane Florence barreling toward the Carolinas as a Category 4 storm.

“But afterwards, I would expect that he will do that,” Hannity said.

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It’s unclear what knowledge, or lack thereof, Hannity is using to make his prediction.

Phone calls between Hannity and Trump are frequent occurrences, discussing everything from Hannity’s show to Trump’s frustration with the Mueller investigation and to what the president should tweet, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and associates of Trump and Hannity who told The Washington Post in April.

The Daily Beast also reported in February that the pair had frequent phone conversations about whether the president should release a controversial GOP memo by Congressman Devin Nunes that was critical of both the FBI and Justice Department.

It was revealed the two men even shared the same attorney at one point, Michael Cohen, who has since pleaded guilty to eight charges of campaign finance violations and tax and bank fraud that also stemmed from Mueller’s investigation.

“The bottom line is, during the heat of the campaign when relationships are forged, [Hannity] was always there, offering good advice, in person and on television,” former deputy Trump campaign manager David Bossie told The Post. “The president sees [Hannity] as an incredibly smart and articulate spokesman for the agenda.”

This public announcement sounds incredible, given the ability to compress the sequence of developments in less then 18 months of the current presidency. It either reinforces the idea of general philosophical suppression ad. absurdity into extreme nominalism, through toward an unsurpassed deontological bypass of the center, or an equally unprecendent works of an unhinged consequantiality of manifest destiny, unable to harness the immeasurable intermediaries within the workings of political process, literally trumped by constitutionally effects.

This binary process defies the very workings of constitutional Democrat y, as apprehended by the founding fathers.

Here is a totally and diametrically opposed opinion, by now, completely credible ; entirely dependent on the credibility of the Steele dossier:

President Trump speaks at the South Lawn of the White House, July 27, 2018. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)The outcome of the midterms may depend on how quickly the administration can counter-attack on the legal front.The almost unnoticed fact in the latest Democratic assault on the Trump administration is that it is based entirely on charges of confusion, the circus, incoherence, and nastiness. These themes never have to be hammered very long before the faithful take up the incantation about impeachment, but these aren’t impeachable, even if the charges were true. The Resistance has abandoned the accusation of impeachable offenses. The media barely noticed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s acceptance of written answers to questions about collusion, or Rudolph Giuliani’s assertion that there would be no discussion of obstruction of justice, that there has been no obstruction, and that if Mueller thinks he has evidence of any, he should present it. Everyone now knows that the entire Trump–Russian collusion argument was a complete fabrication on the basis of the Steele dossier, which was a pack of lies from A to Z, and, of course, was commissioned and financed by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, through a law firm and Fusion GPS. In terms of ingenious political treachery, Mrs. Clinton and her entourage scored an immense success in subverting high levels of the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department and FBI to pursue this canard with the zeal they did.

On what has emerged to date, fanatically anti-Trump figures in Justice and the FBI swallowed Steele’s story and invested in it so heavily they severely compromised the institutions that employed them. Once Trump was elected, instead of letting the ruse die quietly, they swallowed harder and set out to claim that the election result was fraudulent because of the illegal Trump–Russian collusion. Former National Intelligence director James Clapper announced just two months ago that he believed the Russians had determined the election result, contradicting James Comey’s view. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, proclaimed 18 months ago that a thousand Russian canvassers had swung Wisconsin to Trump. The apparently thoroughly Trump-deranged John Brennan, former CIA director, has been routinely accusing the president of treason for almost two years. The 2016 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, mused about whether the president’s son, son-in-law, and former campaign manager were guilty of treason because they met with a Russian lawyer who wanted to talk about the Magnitsky Act (nothing to do with the election).

Hillary Clinton must have been serenely confident that the source, quality, and funding of the Steele dossier would never see the light of day. In her memoir of the election, What Happened (not a question), she directly blames former FBI director James Comey for “shivving” her three times (two of the occasions were exonerations of her questionable appropriateness), and Donald Trump’s semi-treasonable collaboration with the Russian government, and she quoted Steele in support of this. When the fact came to light that her campaign had funded this nonsense for about $9 million, she breezily said that it was “campaign information” but accurate anyway. (Treason applies only when collaboration is with a country with which the betrayed country is at war.)

It was the dirtiest political trick in American history, but, in fairness to Mrs. Clinton, I doubt if she intended to do more than throw muck at her opponent in the last days of the election, since the Billy Bush tape had not, as had been expected, knock him out. When she lost, as Steele himself was still, with the aid of some officials, padding around the less reputable media pushing his dossier, Mrs. Clinton seized on it to explain her inexplicable defeat and threw in poor old Comey, who had bent his giraffe-like frame over backwards to exonerate her on the emails debacle, where she almost surely lied to a federal official, Comey in particular. Martha Stewart was sent to prison for less, and seems to have violated serious statutes. This was when Peter Strzok had finished whitewashing Clinton for Comey and jumped to trying to inculpate Trump. He wrote, early on to his girlfriend and workmate, Lisa Page, of the collusion argument, that there was “probably no there there.” Yet this purposeless beast of an investigation of something that everyone who knew anything about it knew did not happen is still continuing.

In their desperation to keep the president on his back foot until the midterm elections, the Democrats joined the Never Trump chorus in the McCain obsequies, and the habitually discredited political gossip Bob Woodward, reinforced by anonymous informants recruited or invented by the New York Times, wrote that the Trump White House was in chaos (irrelevant if the Constitution is not being violated and the policies work). Paid plants heckled at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings where Democratic senators reenacted a fictitious movie about a first-century slave revolt to protest the confidentiality of documents that had already been released, and Barack Obama hit the trail to rewrite the history of his broadly unsuccessful presidency. Even sensible and moderate commentators who don’t like Trump went back on autocue to announce that this was “the darkest hour” of Trump’s administration, as they have, every six weeks or so since the executive order about travelers from terrorism-plagued or -sponsoring countries in February 2017: Charlottesville, Helsinki, Manafort and Cohen, etc. Trump is about to declassify what congressional committees have been seeking, and the anti-Trump media will have real problems maintaining their implacable righteousness. By then, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe may have been indicted, and the charges won’t stop with him.

I recommend clemency. I don’t believe in a deep state, just an arrogant, smothering, bipartisan mindset that easily construed self-defense as service of the national interest, even when it involved criminal conduct. In this respect it does bear some comparison with the conduct of Nixon underlings in the Watergate era. The mystery is why Robert Mueller, for all his experience and vaunted probity, chose a gang of rabid Trump-haters to conduct this operation, and why, when he must have realized it was a wild goose chase, he didn’t fold it up or turn it into an investigation of the sleazy conduct of Trump’s enemies, which, given the Russian connection, would have been within his mandate. There is now evidence that Steele, even after he was fired by the FBI for leaking material, via senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr “and his lovely wife,” as Trump calls Mrs. Ohr (who worked at Fusion with Steele), moved straight to Mueller’s special-counsel team. Mueller may have mishandled this so badly, he ensnares himself in the misconduct of those who commissioned him. Mueller has prolonged this false cloud over the administration while using his authoritarian office to try to terrorize Paul Manafort into a false inculpation of the president, has mouse-trapped a couple of lesser figures (14 days in jail for George Papadopoulos), and purported to indict a number of Russians who will never appear in an American court and whose names could have been taken from the Moscow telephone directory.

The outcome of the midterm elections may depend on how quickly the administration can counter-attack on the legal front. When the Mueller charade is finally out of the way, everyone involved in the false applications for a FISA surveillance warrant against junior Trump campaign helper Carter Page will face the music, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and very prominent members of the Obama administration. Whatever happens in November, all this will unravel. The combination of the jungle ruthlessness of high American politics with the idealism of the Constitution occasionally creates bizarre and sordid dramas. Eventually, just when the pious claptrap about no one being above the law becomes almost insufferable, the puritanical conscience of America rises like a cobra and strikes the wrongdoers. The twist here is that the hunted president, who has broken no laws, will make the kill. It’s reality politics, wending toward a surprising climax.

IN THE NEWS: ‘[WATCH] GOP Faces Deadline Crunch as Midterms Near’

CONRAD BLACK — Conrad Black’s latest book is Donald J. Trump, A President Like No Other. @conradmblackMORE IN POLITICS & POLICYSave the E-CigsIn Defense of Norm MacdonaldThe Online Left Learns to Love Conspiracy TheoriesWhy I Changed the Way I Write about Police Shootings

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter said she believes President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, authored an anonymous op-ed that claimed there is a network of individuals in the administration who are seeking to stave off the president's "worst inclinations."

"Because he and Ivanka are going to have to go back to the Upper East Side and go to the Hamptons," Coulter explained in an interview with the Daily Beast published on Thursday.

"They're probably worried that Trump will be removed within the next few years," Coulter said. "They had just gone to the [Sen. John] McCain funeral, and [the op-ed] was right after Labor Day, so they were probably feeling wistful for the Hamptons. And the only way they can get back in is if they can say, 'Don't worry, we're the ones who stopped the wall.'"

A conspiracy theory from Ann Coulter, bizaar or believable or not, fact or fake? Who can judge in a failing-fast- justice system ?

The plot has thickened to an extent, that even conspiracy theories have conspiracy theories. So many heads have fallen along the way, that the clear message is : You be your own judge and jury, there is no end to the bottom less pit of a cesspool, and beware, not to go there, no less look in there.

Now was this a clever ploy to atomize authority so the can start branding people?

Paranoia rains: could it happen?

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A radiation symbol with Trump's photo is shown.Politico illustration: Getty/iStock

THE FRIDAY COVER

How Obama Made It Easier for Trump to Launch a NukeMaybe we should talk about this?

By MARC AMBINDER September 14, 2018Facebook Twitter Google + Email Comment PrintMost folks push to the back of their minds the harrowing notion that a single person could, with one command, launch nuclear Armageddon. And even when we do think about it, we still think in Cold War metaphors: Nuclear attacks have to be big. They have to destroy cities. They have to kill millions.

In fact, the opposite is true: America’s nuclear doctrine—the thing that actually tells our warfighters how to draw up the military’s nuclear war plans—makes it more likely that a modern president will be tempted to order a nuclear strike in response to a non-nuclear attack. And it’s now far easier to do so than ever before in the history of humankind.

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ADVERTISEMENTSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENTLet me pause for a second to remind you that the president today is Donald J. Trump.

In Bob Woodward’s new book on the Trump administration, the author recounts a scene where, in a fit of anger at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against innocents, the president orders Defense Secretary James Mattis to kill the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump is alleged to have said. According to Woodward, Mattis ignored the order, or he didn’t perceive it as a direct order, and instead presented the president with a menu of more limited options.

That moment has emerged as one of the most eye-opening in Woodward’s book, largely because of the shock that a secretary of defense would derail a direct order from the commander in chief. But for national security experts there’s another, potentially scarier reading on what happened in that room: That order could well have been nuclear. And in that case, only a bureaucrat willing to disobey an elected president would stand between us and the first nuclear attack in 70 years.

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ADVERTISEMENTSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENTThis scenario isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Thanks to upgrades to our nuclear systems under President Barack Obama, and recent shifts in Pentagon protocol, it has never been easier for an American president to launch a tactical nuclear attack anywhere on the globe. We know that our current nuclear war plans—OPLAN 8010-12—specifically envision a scenario where the president orders a limited nuclear strike to deter proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. Sarin gas qualifies. So, the Syria crisis is one of the scenarios in which that might happen.

The bigger conversation we should be having about Trump’s Assad order isn’t whether the president is fit or not, or whether he commands the loyalty of his own Cabinet. The conversation to have now is why the U.S. president—no matter who it is—still has an unchecked ability to launch a nuclear attack in the first place.

Story Continued Below

ADVERTISEMENTSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT***

This question has become far more urgent because our nuclear protocols have changed in ways that the public doesn’t yet appreciate. Until very recently, the chart-topping superstars of the nuclear world were called “Major Attack Options.” These were nuclear-attack plans aimed at adversaries that the Pentagon considers “peer” or “near-peer” nations—the other big global powers. Examples might have been: Destroy all major Russian second-strike nuclear facilities. Another: Cripple the Chinese industrial base. These were blockbuster attack plans designed largely for their deterrent effects—discouraging America’s main foes from any significant geopolitical mischief. The actual attacks would have been colossal: Intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from the United States, bearing warheads packing the equivalent of 300,000 tons of TNT. Nukes in tubes on submarines or attached to the underbellies of fighter bombers would constitute our “second strike” capability, in case the enemy managed to destroy the missiles first. Given the power of our adversaries, one of the biggest guardrails preventing a strike was the likely scale of the response—miscalculate, and millions of our own tribe could die, too. All of this is standard stuff. Deterrence 101.

Around the end of the Cold War, a new set of adversaries was added to the target base: WMD proliferators, including smaller rogue regimes that might be developing their own nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. North Korea, or Syria, or Iran, at certain points, might find themselves subject to a similar apocalypse. A nuclear attack on one of these regimes might not trigger the same scale of retaliation as an attack on a peer nation, but it still came with the potential for horrifying unintended casualties. Any strike in this category—even a “limited” one—would cause huge amounts of collateral damage, and this again was a powerful disincentive for any president to launch a nuke.

Story Continued Below

But in 2018, America’s nuclear arsenal is starting to look very different than it once did, and the scenarios that might prompt the expenditure of a weapon have multiplied. The catalogue of weapons that President Trump has at his beck and call now, and will have into a possible second term, include nuclear gravity bombs like the one ostentatiously tested in Nevada in June by the Air Force. Called B61-12s, they’ve been upgraded with ground-penetrating firepower, hyper-accurate guidance systems and variable yield technology.

Story Continued Below

These enhancements mean that a nuke could be used on a relatively narrow target, such as the command and control facilities that Russia would need to strike at its former satellites, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. And they also increase the likelihood that a president might be tempted to use one elsewhere, for whatever military or even political purpose he wanted. The U.S. now also has the technology to attach tiny, precise, low-yield warheads to the newest cruise missiles it’s developing—the type that could be launched from somewhere in Europe, at, say, Syria. (Deploying these weapons is currently banned by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty—but the U.S. believes Russia has already violated this treaty, and the U.S leadership could decide, via a classified presidential policy directive, to experimentally move a few of these to Europe, just in case.) A third toy for presidents: low-yield cruise missiles launched from submarines.

The Pentagon says, with some credibility, that these weapons are needed as a new kind of deterrent for a new variety of warfare. They argue that advances in Russian military strategy, such as Moscow’s theory of “coercive escalation,” might lead President Vladimir Putin or his successor to use tactical nuclear weapons to claw back territory in Europe, assuming the U.S. would not have—or did not have—the weapons in its arsenal to respond to a “limited” challenge.

Story Continued Below

But in the end, nuclear deterrence is still based on psychology, not technology. The bad guys have to believe that our weapons are actually weapons we would actually use in actual conflicts, or else they’re going to do things counter to our interests. The big problem is that the technology we use to deliver nuclear weapons has advanced to the point where a president might not find all that much reason to worry about using a nuclear weapon in a real conflict. If she or he can be assured that the radioactive fallout would be minimal, the threat to civilians basically zero and the scope of the destruction precisely tailored, then many of the disincentives fall away.

***

Story Continued Below

It may seem strange that Obama—a man who called passionately for a world without any nuclear weapons at all—was responsible for this dangerous suite of upgrades. But to achieve his nuclear-diplomacy goals, he had to expend enormous political capital. In 2010, he persuaded the Senate to pass a nuclear arms treaty with Russia reducing the number of warheads each country was allowed to keep at the ready. But the tradeoff, negotiated primarily with Sen. Jon Kyl, the Republicans’ point person on all things nuclear at the time, was that Obama essentially signed off on the purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of upgrades to the nuclear arsenal—upgrades that made it more likely that a successor will one day use one of the damned things.

Obama wanted to address this. Several of his advisers have told me that he intended to kick off a serious public debate in his second term about how the weapons might be used and who could legitimately authorize their use. In the end, he ran out of time and bandwidth.

Story Continued Below

Nuclear planners use a term, Directed/Adaptive Planning Capability Options, whose official meaning is classified. But the essence is this: Given the requirement to adapt to a worldwide crisis situation, the president can, within 8 hours, direct a nuclear weapon delivered to any location on Earth. The president can order one of these things alone, and then, without consulting anymore—not his secretary of defense, not his national security adviser, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff—he can release his finger from the trigger. All it would take is a phone call.

The call could from a regular, non-secure cell phone if he wanted. On the other end would be the Emergency Actions controller working near a console at one of America’s nuclear command post facilities—a set of (at least) four that are online around the clock. There would be a quick exchange of authentication codes, and then—in less than the time it takes the president to fire off a tweet—a nuclear release order could be formatted and transmitted to the forces.

Story Continued Below

So if indeed there are forces inside the Executive Office of the Presidency who are seeking to thwart the will of the duly elected president, for reasons noble or nefarious; if breaking the brittle but enduring compacts that allow the most powerful person on the planet to exercise free reign over an enormous range of executive and deadly powers is now a rule, then let me suggest we use this period of creative destruction to ask some new questions.

That is: Is the ability of the president or the United States to order a nuclear strike against anyone, anything, anywhere on Earth, without being forced to consult with anyone who might urge him otherwise, ethical? Can we come up with a better system?

Story Continued Below

Thanks to time, money and ingenuity, America’s nuclear command and control system is more reliable than it used to be, but it is nowhere near as reliable as it should be, as on the record testimony from Air Force generals and others regularly demonstrate. Capabilities have “atrophied,” Gen. Robin Rand, the head of the Air Force’s nuclear strike command, told Congress in March. Critical warning systems have security flaws. Newer technology might be vulnerable to cyberattack and spoofing. Recently, CNN reported, somewhat opaquely, that Secretary of Defense Mattis was so concerned about the state of our nuclear communications that he ordered a large-scale, classified reordering of who gets what nuclear orders.

Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Hard to say, because our politicians tend to be completely ignorant of these arrangements. Voters don’t ask about them. They don’t know what to ask. We have focused on the “demand” side of the equation—the nukes and how to use them—with only one congressional hearing, to my knowledge, on the more important question, which is: Under what circumstances do we, the American people, want the president and the president alone, to be able to order any nuclear strike?

Story Continued Below

Harry Truman first asserted the sole authority to decide the question for himself, and aside from presidents secretly pre-delegating this power in the event they’re killed or can’t be found, Congress has rarely raised a peep about this use of executive authority, which resides in the Constitution’s second article. But there is no law that codifies this, or qualifies it, or even figures out how to mesh it with Congress’s constitutional power to declare war. And though anyone in the military can refuse to execute an illegal order, there is very little guidance on what an illegal nuclear order might look like.

***

Story Continued Below

Obama could hardly have imagined he needed to spend time on the softer side of our nuclear doctrine—the laws and rules that govern the use of these deadly weapons—because he could not envision the United States electing a president whose temperament was so manifestly unsuited for the hair-trigger, always-on-alert posture the high priests of America’s nuclear weapons complex have spent 70 years refining.

Now we know that’s possible. So why not require that, in all but the most urgent situations, the president consult with select members of Congress during the process of deciding whether to launch even a single, targeted strike? And we might even debate whether we have a duty to humanity not to retaliate, even if it means absorbing our own casualties.

Politically untenable? Not really. A line in the National Defense Authorization Act would be sufficient to kick off a debate, and if the president decided to ignore the will of Congress, he or she would at least be forced to so do in public—pushing to the forefront of our minds the still-existential risks posed by not just the proliferation of nuclear weapons but the advancements in their accuracy, their quality, their deadliness, and the willingness that a president, perhaps in anger, might one day order their use.

Story Continued Below

Counting on James Mattis to ignore such a command seems like a risk most Americans wouldn’t want to take.

Share on Facebook Share on TwitterMarc Ambinder, a contributing editor at The Week, The Atlantic and GQ, is working on a book about nuclear war scares.

There is a twist developing. Thete is a conditionally bad possible development if Trump is impeached, or resigns, or dismissed for incompetence: and there is a good reason: SPence may be even a worse choice :

Rolling StoneHOMEPOLITICSPOLITICS NEWSIf You’re Hoping Trump Will Be Impeached, Be Careful What You Wish For We could be looking at a decade of President Mike Pence

DAVID S. COHENSEPTEMBER 14, 2018 9:53AM EDT

Mike Pence, Donald Trump

Evan Vucci/AP/REX/ShutterstockAre you rooting hard for President Trump to be impeached and removed from office? Or, as the anonymous New York Times op-ed last week discussed, hoping there will be an invocation of the (completely unrealistic) 25th Amendment? Or better yet, for him to hang his head in shame and resign?

If so, you’re certainly not alone, as every passing day there is new reason to doubt Trump’s competence and evidence linking him to criminal behavior is piling up. But there’s a huge risk: If Trump vacates the office, we could face almost 10 years of President Mike Pence. Is that something you really want?

After all, Pence is a true believer right-wing conservative. He is virulently anti-abortion and anti-gay rights and has a long history of slashing government programs. He once even had a talk radio show that he himself described as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

Anyone with basic knowledge of the U.S. presidency and Constitution is probably a bit puzzled by the possibility of Pence serving 10 years, given the two-term (eight-year) limit.

Originally, there were no term limits for the presidency, but for a century and a half those who held the office followed George Washington’s model of serving only two terms. Until, that is, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four times in a row. He and his supporters argued that his continued service was needed during extraordinary times (World War II). After FDR died just months into his fourth term, the issue of term limits for the president became a national priority.

As a result, in 1951, the Constitution was amended. The 22nd Amendment now limits the president to two four-year terms: “No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.”

How could Pence get around this limit and serve a possible 10 years total? The 22nd Amendment has something akin to small print. If someone becomes president by filling a vacancy in the office (such as when the president is impeached, resigns or dies) – but does so for less than two years – that person can run for office two more times, not just once.

In other words, if Pence became president anytime after noon on January 20th, 2019, he would be allowed to run for two more terms.

Of course, this is not a terribly likely scenario. But, as January 20th approaches, it’s not completely far-fetched either. Consider this. It is looking increasingly likely that the Democrats will take back the House this November 6th and maybe even the Senate (though that’s much less likely). The new Democratic-controlled Congress begins service on January 3rd. All it takes to impeach a president in the House is a majority vote. Given all that we know about President Trump, the House might act quickly and then send the impeachment to the Senate, which needs a two-thirds vote to remove the president – a much taller order.

Even under the most optimistic Democratic scenarios, the party will not have a two-thirds majority in the Senate. But maybe by this point, if there is in fact a big blue wave in November, enough Republican senators will have gotten the message that Trump is toxic. Or maybe other Republicans, after a big defeat in November, will look at Pence and see a stable (read: boring), staunch conservative who can redeem the Republican Party after the chaos of Trump. So, enough Republican Senators join the Democrats to get to two-thirds, removing Trump from office.

Or it could happen much quicker than that. Fearing bruising congressional investigations or even an imminent indictment, he could decide it’s smarter to resign, like President Nixon did, rather than suffer the consequences of a public airing of all that Special Counsel Robert Mueller – or even prosecutors in the Southern District of New York – have been gathering.

If he were to leave office in either of these ways, it would be entirely possible that Pence would just be a placeholder and the Democrats would take over after the 2020 election, like Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned. But it’s also possible that the country would feel massive relief from someone who, no matter what you think of Pence’s politics, is not Donald Trump. Would that translate into Pence winning national elections? Who knows, but it is certainly within the realm of possibility that, just by virtue of not being Trump, Pence could get a huge boost.

If that were to happen, we could be facing Pence running for president twice after completing Trump’s first term and ultimately serving in the office for up to 10 years. When you read the fine print of the Constitution, that’s perfectly acceptable.

So, for those of us clamoring for Trump to be removed from office or resign in disgrace, we really have to be careful what we wish for.

[quote="Meno_"]Conservative commentator Ann Coulter said she believes President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, authored an anonymous op-ed that claimed there is a network of individuals in the administration who are seeking to stave off the president's "worst inclinations."

"Because he and Ivanka are going to have to go back to the Upper East Side and go to the Hamptons," Coulter explained in an interview with the Daily Beast published on Thursday.

"They're probably worried that Trump will be removed within the next few years," Coulter said. "They had just gone to the [Sen. John] McCain funeral, and [the op-ed] was right after Labor Day, so they were probably feeling wistful for the Hamptons. And the only way they can get back in is if they can say, 'Don't worry, we're the ones who stopped the wall.'"

A conspiracy theory from Ann Coulter, bizaar or believable or not, fact or fake? Who can judge in a failing-fast- justice system ?

The plot has thickened to an extent, that even conspiracy theories have conspiracy theories. So many heads have fallen along the way, that the clear message is : You be your own judge and jury, there is no end to the bottom less pit of a cesspool, and beware, not to go there, no less look in there.

Now was this a clever ploy to atomize authority so the can start branding people?

Paranoia rains: could it happen?

POLITICO MagazineMenuGoogle PlusFacebookTwitter

A radiation symbol with Trump's photo is shown.Politico illustration: Getty/iStock

THE FRIDAY COVER

How Obama Made It Easier for Trump to Launch a NukeMaybe we should talk about this?

By MARC AMBINDER September 14, 2018Facebook Twitter Google + Email Comment PrintMost folks push to the back of their minds the harrowing notion that a single person could, with one command, launch nuclear Armageddon. And even when we do think about it, we still think in Cold War metaphors: Nuclear attacks have to be big. They have to destroy cities. They have to kill millions.

In fact, the opposite is true: America’s nuclear doctrine—the thing that actually tells our warfighters how to draw up the military’s nuclear war plans—makes it more likely that a modern president will be tempted to order a nuclear strike in response to a non-nuclear attack. And it’s now far easier to do so than ever before in the history of humankind.

Story Continued Below

ADVERTISEMENTSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENTLet me pause for a second to remind you that the president today is Donald J. Trump.

In Bob Woodward’s new book on the Trump administration, the author recounts a scene where, in a fit of anger at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against innocents, the president orders Defense Secretary James Mattis to kill the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump is alleged to have said. According to Woodward, Mattis ignored the order, or he didn’t perceive it as a direct order, and instead presented the president with a menu of more limited options.

That moment has emerged as one of the most eye-opening in Woodward’s book, largely because of the shock that a secretary of defense would derail a direct order from the commander in chief. But for national security experts there’s another, potentially scarier reading on what happened in that room: That order could well have been nuclear. And in that case, only a bureaucrat willing to disobey an elected president would stand between us and the first nuclear attack in 70 years.

Story Continued Below

ADVERTISEMENTSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENTThis scenario isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Thanks to upgrades to our nuclear systems under President Barack Obama, and recent shifts in Pentagon protocol, it has never been easier for an American president to launch a tactical nuclear attack anywhere on the globe. We know that our current nuclear war plans—OPLAN 8010-12—specifically envision a scenario where the president orders a limited nuclear strike to deter proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. Sarin gas qualifies. So, the Syria crisis is one of the scenarios in which that might happen.

The bigger conversation we should be having about Trump’s Assad order isn’t whether the president is fit or not, or whether he commands the loyalty of his own Cabinet. The conversation to have now is why the U.S. president—no matter who it is—still has an unchecked ability to launch a nuclear attack in the first place.

Story Continued Below

ADVERTISEMENTSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT***

This question has become far more urgent because our nuclear protocols have changed in ways that the public doesn’t yet appreciate. Until very recently, the chart-topping superstars of the nuclear world were called “Major Attack Options.” These were nuclear-attack plans aimed at adversaries that the Pentagon considers “peer” or “near-peer” nations—the other big global powers. Examples might have been: Destroy all major Russian second-strike nuclear facilities. Another: Cripple the Chinese industrial base. These were blockbuster attack plans designed largely for their deterrent effects—discouraging America’s main foes from any significant geopolitical mischief. The actual attacks would have been colossal: Intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from the United States, bearing warheads packing the equivalent of 300,000 tons of TNT. Nukes in tubes on submarines or attached to the underbellies of fighter bombers would constitute our “second strike” capability, in case the enemy managed to destroy the missiles first. Given the power of our adversaries, one of the biggest guardrails preventing a strike was the likely scale of the response—miscalculate, and millions of our own tribe could die, too. All of this is standard stuff. Deterrence 101.

Around the end of the Cold War, a new set of adversaries was added to the target base: WMD proliferators, including smaller rogue regimes that might be developing their own nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. North Korea, or Syria, or Iran, at certain points, might find themselves subject to a similar apocalypse. A nuclear attack on one of these regimes might not trigger the same scale of retaliation as an attack on a peer nation, but it still came with the potential for horrifying unintended casualties. Any strike in this category—even a “limited” one—would cause huge amounts of collateral damage, and this again was a powerful disincentive for any president to launch a nuke.

Story Continued Below

But in 2018, America’s nuclear arsenal is starting to look very different than it once did, and the scenarios that might prompt the expenditure of a weapon have multiplied. The catalogue of weapons that President Trump has at his beck and call now, and will have into a possible second term, include nuclear gravity bombs like the one ostentatiously tested in Nevada in June by the Air Force. Called B61-12s, they’ve been upgraded with ground-penetrating firepower, hyper-accurate guidance systems and variable yield technology.

Story Continued Below

These enhancements mean that a nuke could be used on a relatively narrow target, such as the command and control facilities that Russia would need to strike at its former satellites, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. And they also increase the likelihood that a president might be tempted to use one elsewhere, for whatever military or even political purpose he wanted. The U.S. now also has the technology to attach tiny, precise, low-yield warheads to the newest cruise missiles it’s developing—the type that could be launched from somewhere in Europe, at, say, Syria. (Deploying these weapons is currently banned by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty—but the U.S. believes Russia has already violated this treaty, and the U.S leadership could decide, via a classified presidential policy directive, to experimentally move a few of these to Europe, just in case.) A third toy for presidents: low-yield cruise missiles launched from submarines.

The Pentagon says, with some credibility, that these weapons are needed as a new kind of deterrent for a new variety of warfare. They argue that advances in Russian military strategy, such as Moscow’s theory of “coercive escalation,” might lead President Vladimir Putin or his successor to use tactical nuclear weapons to claw back territory in Europe, assuming the U.S. would not have—or did not have—the weapons in its arsenal to respond to a “limited” challenge.

Story Continued Below

But in the end, nuclear deterrence is still based on psychology, not technology. The bad guys have to believe that our weapons are actually weapons we would actually use in actual conflicts, or else they’re going to do things counter to our interests. The big problem is that the technology we use to deliver nuclear weapons has advanced to the point where a president might not find all that much reason to worry about using a nuclear weapon in a real conflict. If she or he can be assured that the radioactive fallout would be minimal, the threat to civilians basically zero and the scope of the destruction precisely tailored, then many of the disincentives fall away.

***

Story Continued Below

It may seem strange that Obama—a man who called passionately for a world without any nuclear weapons at all—was responsible for this dangerous suite of upgrades. But to achieve his nuclear-diplomacy goals, he had to expend enormous political capital. In 2010, he persuaded the Senate to pass a nuclear arms treaty with Russia reducing the number of warheads each country was allowed to keep at the ready. But the tradeoff, negotiated primarily with Sen. Jon Kyl, the Republicans’ point person on all things nuclear at the time, was that Obama essentially signed off on the purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of upgrades to the nuclear arsenal—upgrades that made it more likely that a successor will one day use one of the damned things.

Obama wanted to address this. Several of his advisers have told me that he intended to kick off a serious public debate in his second term about how the weapons might be used and who could legitimately authorize their use. In the end, he ran out of time and bandwidth.

Story Continued Below

Nuclear planners use a term, Directed/Adaptive Planning Capability Options, whose official meaning is classified. But the essence is this: Given the requirement to adapt to a worldwide crisis situation, the president can, within 8 hours, direct a nuclear weapon delivered to any location on Earth. The president can order one of these things alone, and then, without consulting anymore—not his secretary of defense, not his national security adviser, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff—he can release his finger from the trigger. All it would take is a phone call.

The call could from a regular, non-secure cell phone if he wanted. On the other end would be the Emergency Actions controller working near a console at one of America’s nuclear command post facilities—a set of (at least) four that are online around the clock. There would be a quick exchange of authentication codes, and then—in less than the time it takes the president to fire off a tweet—a nuclear release order could be formatted and transmitted to the forces.

Story Continued Below

So if indeed there are forces inside the Executive Office of the Presidency who are seeking to thwart the will of the duly elected president, for reasons noble or nefarious; if breaking the brittle but enduring compacts that allow the most powerful person on the planet to exercise free reign over an enormous range of executive and deadly powers is now a rule, then let me suggest we use this period of creative destruction to ask some new questions.

That is: Is the ability of the president or the United States to order a nuclear strike against anyone, anything, anywhere on Earth, without being forced to consult with anyone who might urge him otherwise, ethical? Can we come up with a better system?

Story Continued Below

Thanks to time, money and ingenuity, America’s nuclear command and control system is more reliable than it used to be, but it is nowhere near as reliable as it should be, as on the record testimony from Air Force generals and others regularly demonstrate. Capabilities have “atrophied,” Gen. Robin Rand, the head of the Air Force’s nuclear strike command, told Congress in March. Critical warning systems have security flaws. Newer technology might be vulnerable to cyberattack and spoofing. Recently, CNN reported, somewhat opaquely, that Secretary of Defense Mattis was so concerned about the state of our nuclear communications that he ordered a large-scale, classified reordering of who gets what nuclear orders.

Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Hard to say, because our politicians tend to be completely ignorant of these arrangements. Voters don’t ask about them. They don’t know what to ask. We have focused on the “demand” side of the equation—the nukes and how to use them—with only one congressional hearing, to my knowledge, on the more important question, which is: Under what circumstances do we, the American people, want the president and the president alone, to be able to order any nuclear strike?

Story Continued Below

Harry Truman first asserted the sole authority to decide the question for himself, and aside from presidents secretly pre-delegating this power in the event they’re killed or can’t be found, Congress has rarely raised a peep about this use of executive authority, which resides in the Constitution’s second article. But there is no law that codifies this, or qualifies it, or even figures out how to mesh it with Congress’s constitutional power to declare war. And though anyone in the military can refuse to execute an illegal order, there is very little guidance on what an illegal nuclear order might look like.

***

Story Continued Below

Obama could hardly have imagined he needed to spend time on the softer side of our nuclear doctrine—the laws and rules that govern the use of these deadly weapons—because he could not envision the United States electing a president whose temperament was so manifestly unsuited for the hair-trigger, always-on-alert posture the high priests of America’s nuclear weapons complex have spent 70 years refining.

Now we know that’s possible. So why not require that, in all but the most urgent situations, the president consult with select members of Congress during the process of deciding whether to launch even a single, targeted strike? And we might even debate whether we have a duty to humanity not to retaliate, even if it means absorbing our own casualties.

Politically untenable? Not really. A line in the National Defense Authorization Act would be sufficient to kick off a debate, and if the president decided to ignore the will of Congress, he or she would at least be forced to so do in public—pushing to the forefront of our minds the still-existential risks posed by not just the proliferation of nuclear weapons but the advancements in their accuracy, their quality, their deadliness, and the willingness that a president, perhaps in anger, might one day order their use.

Story Continued Below

Counting on James Mattis to ignore such a command seems like a risk most Americans wouldn’t want to take.

Share on Facebook Share on TwitterMarc Ambinder, a contributing editor at The Week, The Atlantic and GQ, is working on a book about nuclear war scares.

There is a twist developing. Thete is a conditionally bad possible development if Trump is impeached, or resigns, or dismissed for incompetence: and there is a good reason: SPence may be even a worse choice :

Rolling StoneHOMEPOLITICSPOLITICS NEWSIf You’re Hoping Trump Will Be Impeached, Be Careful What You Wish For We could be looking at a decade of President Mike Pence

DAVID S. COHENSEPTEMBER 14, 2018 9:53AM EDT

Mike Pence, Donald Trump

Evan Vucci/AP/REX/ShutterstockAre you rooting hard for President Trump to be impeached and removed from office? Or, as the anonymous New York Times op-ed last week discussed, hoping there will be an invocation of the (completely unrealistic) 25th Amendment? Or better yet, for him to hang his head in shame and resign?

If so, you’re certainly not alone, as every passing day there is new reason to doubt Trump’s competence and evidence linking him to criminal behavior is piling up. But there’s a huge risk: If Trump vacates the office, we could face almost 10 years of President Mike Pence. Is that something you really want?

After all, Pence is a true believer right-wing conservative. He is virulently anti-abortion and anti-gay rights and has a long history of slashing government programs. He once even had a talk radio show that he himself described as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

Anyone with basic knowledge of the U.S. presidency and Constitution is probably a bit puzzled by the possibility of Pence serving 10 years, given the two-term (eight-year) limit.

Originally, there were no term limits for the presidency, but for a century and a half those who held the office followed George Washington’s model of serving only two terms. Until, that is, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four times in a row. He and his supporters argued that his continued service was needed during extraordinary times (World War II). After FDR died just months into his fourth term, the issue of term limits for the president became a national priority.

As a result, in 1951, the Constitution was amended. The 22nd Amendment now limits the president to two four-year terms: “No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.”

How could Pence get around this limit and serve a possible 10 years total? The 22nd Amendment has something akin to small print. If someone becomes president by filling a vacancy in the office (such as when the president is impeached, resigns or dies) – but does so for less than two years – that person can run for office two more times, not just once.

In other words, if Pence became president anytime after noon on January 20th, 2019, he would be allowed to run for two more terms.

Of course, this is not a terribly likely scenario. But, as January 20th approaches, it’s not completely far-fetched either. Consider this. It is looking increasingly likely that the Democrats will take back the House this November 6th and maybe even the Senate (though that’s much less likely). The new Democratic-controlled Congress begins service on January 3rd. All it takes to impeach a president in the House is a majority vote. Given all that we know about President Trump, the House might act quickly and then send the impeachment to the Senate, which needs a two-thirds vote to remove the president – a much taller order.

Even under the most optimistic Democratic scenarios, the party will not have a two-thirds majority in the Senate. But maybe by this point, if there is in fact a big blue wave in November, enough Republican senators will have gotten the message that Trump is toxic. Or maybe other Republicans, after a big defeat in November, will look at Pence and see a stable (read: boring), staunch conservative who can redeem the Republican Party after the chaos of Trump. So, enough Republican Senators join the Democrats to get to two-thirds, removing Trump from office.

Or it could happen much quicker than that. Fearing bruising congressional investigations or even an imminent indictment, he could decide it’s smarter to resign, like President Nixon did, rather than suffer the consequences of a public airing of all that Special Counsel Robert Mueller – or even prosecutors in the Southern District of New York – have been gathering.

If he were to leave office in either of these ways, it would be entirely possible that Pence would just be a placeholder and the Democrats would take over after the 2020 election, like Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned. But it’s also possible that the country would feel massive relief from someone who, no matter what you think of Pence’s politics, is not Donald Trump. Would that translate into Pence winning national elections? Who knows, but it is certainly within the realm of possibility that, just by virtue of not being Trump, Pence could get a huge boost.

If that were to happen, we could be facing Pence running for president twice after completing Trump’s first term and ultimately serving in the office for up to 10 years. When you read the fine print of the Constitution, that’s perfectly acceptable.

So, for those of us clamoring for Trump to be removed from office or resign in disgrace, we really have to be careful what we wish for.

New today:

Trump Believes There’s a Coup’

PLUS: Bombshell Texts Show Strzok-Page Calling for ‘MEDIA LEAKS’

Dear Reader,

There it was, blazoned across Vanity Fair: “Trump Believes There’s a Coup.”

Citing inside White House sources, Vanity Fair reports that Trump fully realizes that the Deep State wants to remove him from office.

And holy smokes.

Have you seen them — the latest stream of texts from FBI official Peter Strzok released to the public?

The first major book to reveal these as the “smoking gun” proving a plot to get Trump was Jerome Corsi’s Killing the Deep State.

This is the MUST-READ political tell-all of the year.

If you don’t have it, you need to claim your FREE COPY of Dr. Corsi’s New York Times bestseller, Killing the Deep State, here.

And it’s the reason we’re convinced Bob Woodward released his big book of lies about Trump.

The Deep State HAD to do something to try and divert attention from the fact Corsi’s allegations have been gaining acceptance!

And then there’s the looming election. In Killing the Deep State, Corsi explained why the media and establishment attacks this year would be so vicious.

The plan was to get control of Congress, create a hostile Congress, one ready to pull the trigger on impeachment.

Now, get a load of this…

A new batch of text messages just released show these Deep State operatives concocted a “media leak” strategy.

Just as Corsi predicted!

Just look at this text from FBI agent and Deep State operative Peter Strzok to FBI colleague and partner in crime (and in bed) Lisa Page on April 10, 2017:

"I had literally just gone to find this phone to tell you I want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ before you go."

Their attorneys are denying it, claiming it’s an effort to stop leaks.

HA! If you believe that we have a bridge in Brooklyn we want to sell you.

It only gets better. Listen to this…

On April 11 — the day after that text — The Washington Post published a story on Trump adviser Carter Page being under surveillance as a result of the FBI and DOJ convincing a judge to allow it.

He was supposedly placed under FISA surveillance because there was cause to believe he was acting as an agent of Russia.

And the collusion continued…

On April 22 another Strzok text message to Page read: "article is out! Well done, Page." Now do you really think they’re trying to stop leaks? What a load of FBI lies.

Trump’s got their number.

Earlier this week he tweeted about the media leak strategy, calling out the DOJ and FBI for doing absolutely NOTHING ABOUT IT.

Trump is no dummy.

He’s been on the tail of the Deep State, knowing they’re out for him.

He’s read Corsi’s book, that’s clear. He knows their game plan now.

If you do just one thing today, get your copy of the explosive new Killing the Deep State. It’s easy to get your FREE COPY — click here.

This runaway bestseller from Dr. Jerome Corsi goes deep into the underbelly of our nation’s capital, exposing America’s shadow government and their mission to destroy Trump.

Be prepared, though, because it’s a shocking yet eye-opening read.

When you read your FREE copy of Killing the Deep State you’ll understand why the FBI and DOJ are doing nothing — they’re all part of the Deep State right up to the highest in command. You’ll find proof of the leak strategies right here on these pages:

Page 4

Page 7

Page 34

Page 75

Look, if you want to know just how bad it is, this also just happened…

On Monday, in a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, top Republican Mark Meadows, R-N.C., wrote that:

New documents provided to Congress raise “grave concerns” about an “apparent systemic culture of media leaking” among high-level FBI and Justice Department officials to release information damaging to President Trump.

Don’t expect Rosenstein to do anything — he’s a key player. It’s right there on page 63 of Killing the Deep State.

Look, friends, this isn’t a random hate group…

IT’S AN ALL-OUT PLOT TO REMOVE TRUMP!!!

It’s all right here.

Your FREE COPY is waiting — claim it here right now. These books have been flying out the door here. We’re on yet another reprint. If you don’t get your FREE COPY today, it could take weeks, maybe even months, to get it.

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The worst and the dullest. Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty ImagesOn Monday, Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to declassify highly sensitive materials related to an ongoing investigation into his own campaign and administration. Specifically, the president demanded the release of a variety of classified documents related to the FISA warrant application that the FBI submitted to monitor Carter Page; all FBI reports of interviews with senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr (who communicated with former British spy and “dodgy dossier” author, Christopher Steele); and every text message that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr ever sent about the Russia investigation. The president stipulated that said text messages were to be made public “without redaction,” ostensibly ordering the Justice Department to disclose sensitive intelligence sources and methods if that is what full transparency requires.

This was an audacious exercise of Executive authority, even by Trump’s formidable standards. Not only was the president interfering in an active investigation (in which he has a blatant conflict of interest), he was also potentially jeopardizing the security of American intelligence assets, and/or the comfort that foreign intelligence agencies have in sharing their secrets with the United States. A wide array of intelligence experts and officials voiced their opposition to the move. The Justice Department — which did not receive advance instructions detailing exactly what it was expected to release — immediately signaled its intention to slow-walk the request.

All of which prompted the question: What explosive revelations had Trump discovered in these documents? After all, the president doesn’t need to declassify intelligence in order to access it. So he must have already found something that the public needed to know so desperately, concerns about obstruction of justice and national security were mere afterthoughts. It’s not like Donald Trump would release classified materials without first looking into whether the underlying information was important to enough to offset the intelligence community’s concerns — would he?

In an interview with the Hill Tuesday, the president clarified that he would, indeed:

Buck Sexton: Have you reviewed the memos yourself? What do you expect them to show, if so?

President Trump: I have not reviewed them. I have been asked by many people in Congress as you know to release them. I have watched commentators that I respect begging the president of the United States to release them….I have been asked by so many people that I respect, please — the great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanie Pirro.

When fascism comes to America, it will be because a Fox News segment producer took Judge Jeanine’s “Opening Statement” a tad too far.

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The biggest signs of rot: being able to diffuse by first confusing. The bases are loaded, by total compression of public sentiment, of the two, the causes are many, primarily by the conflation of the hidden truth, that make America great again is the result of playing into the expectation of the public to magically revert the hopes of national primacy with the reality that getting out of the impossibility of world control in Democratic means. While, pseudo democratically, the oligarchs unite to sustained ideology, particularly the idea of a Democratic capitalism . its so obvious, that this pr is the anthisesis of the evil intentions of the horrible media.

Biding time spinning tales of the most absurd into finely woven , fabric.

Laura Ingraham calls for the firing of the director of the Justice Department, on charges that he wired phones to monitor President Trump, to begin a torteous process of removing him from office via a so called Chapter 25 law, which would terminate his presidency, up on just findings of incapacity and or mental challenges.

Several books habe been written by various psychiatrists, proving appropriate symptomologies of various kinds. But so far such challenges have been re classified as traits of manageable genius.

Yes like France is hospitalizing Le Pen for showing isil torture victims to the public. Any body who wants to stop torture the left will label insane and remove. That's what a lefty is, a gremlin. God put them with us on the earth to challenge our heart. Anyone who loves anyone or any animal must now face the lefties in his environment and teach them about love. We risk our lives daily to end the cycle of horror and show some lefties that hate isn't the only way. But it hurts man to see so much hate and so much will to torture. Clinton is even on tv again. Saying it is inhumane to prevent decapitations if it is a man who prevents it and colbert laughs in glee, I'm so happy I'm not afflicted like that man Jesus Christmas.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed. ~ Владимир Ильич Ульянов Ленин

Not a soul remembers that is is was gonna own the middle east and Obama had already conceded that decenniums would pass before anyone could do something. But Trump flushed them in six months with Russia. But instead of cheering and weeping joy of relief as it was in my house where we know what torture is the left calls him evil. It has made us all so so sick to know we live in a culture that prefers torture to be continued by a woman over torture getting ended by a man. It shows what is in store.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed. ~ Владимир Ильич Ульянов Ленин